Ghosh met his guru, Swami[?] Sri Yukteswar Giri in 1910, at the age of 17. After graduating from Calcutta University[?] in 1915, he took formal vows into the monastic Swami Order. Twenty years later his guru conferred upon him the title paramahansa which means "supreme swan".

Sri Yukteswar was the disciple of Sri Lahiri Mahasaya, who in turn was the disciple of the guru Mahavatar Babaji. Kriya Yoga, the spiritual science of spiritual realization, was revived by Babaji and is spread to the world through his disciples. Yogananda was his messenger of Kriya Yoga to the West. After founding and running a school for boys in Ranchi, India, where modern educational techniques, yoga training and spiritual ideals were taught, Yogananda taught in the West from 1920 until his death in 1952, where he founded the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF), headquartered in Los Angeles, California.

In 1946, he published his life story, Autobiography of a Yogi[?],
which was instrumental in introducing vedic philosophy[?] to the West.
It has since been translated into 18 languages and remains a perennial best seller.
Yogananda and his guru have attempted to explain some verses and events of the Bible, including the Garden of Eden story. Some of these are featured in this autobiography.

Yogananda has met many spiritual masters, including the Christian stigmatist Therese Neumann and the Indian saint Sri Anandamoyi Ma. In his autobiography he describes his encounters with these and other notable persons such as Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize winning physicist Sir C. V. Raman and others.